How did we end up with the Mon-to-Fri, 9-to-5 grind anyway?

For much of history, humans were guided by nature. The sun told farmers when to wake, the weather told them when to sow. Fishermen relied on tides. People napped the afternoons away. Villages rested after harvest. Every day was a working day, unless there was worship.

1800s: The West started to rapidly industrialise. Man had to mind machines, not nature. Factories ran by the clock, and operated around the clock to maximise output. Productivity was a direct function of how much labour could be extracted from the worker. Children as young as 10 were put to work, often for 10 to 16 hours a day.

1817: Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen came up with a daring idea: a workday, he said, ought to be eight hours of work, eight hours of recreation and eight hours of rest. Some factories started using it right away. But it worked in theory. In practice, factory owners often turned clock hands back, cheating workers into unpaid additional labour. Workers started to organise and push back. As part of that pushback, they adopted an old practice from artisans, guildsmen and cobblers, observing Saint Monday as an extra day off.

1851: A writer, describing a visit to London’s botanical gardens on a Monday, said it was full of “well-dressed, happy and decorous” members of the working class. Factory owners kept opposing the practice, but music halls, theatres and other commercial establishments now organised events on the unofficial day off too.

1855: A print shows a mass picnic at Hampton Court. It’s title: Saint Monday, or the People’s Holiday. In Europe, it thrived until well into the 1880s. Trade unions, however, knew they’d need more than a catchy phrase to push for a formal two-day break.  

1843: A group called the Early Closing Association started to lobby the UK government to allow workers to leave early on Saturday afternoons. A recreational Saturday and worshipful Sunday was a good way to boost productivity too, they argued.

1848: Karl Marx endorsed half-Saturdays in his Communist Manifesto. Trains introduced Saturday discounts on routes to the countryside. Entertainment venues switched their top attractions from Mondays to Saturday afternoons. Even football matches began to be rescheduled.

1868: Relief in America. The US government mandated an eight-hour workday for all federal employees.

1919: The International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, which recommended 48 hours of work a week. India ratified it in 1921.

1926: American carmaker Henry Ford introduced the five-day workweek at his factory. In 1914, he had already increased the daily wages for his workers from $2.34 to $5. Now, workers were paid better for fewer hours. He figured it would be good publicity, plus workers would have more time and means to spend that money.

1929: Scaled-back workweeks were a way to fight the slump of the Great Depression, as fewer hours meant more work for others. But now the fight was reversed, with workers pushing for more time on the floor.

1935: The ILO established the Forty-Hour Week Convention, 1935. To date, 15 nations have ratified it – South Korea as recently as 2011. India is not one of them.

1938: The Fair Labor Standards Act came into force in the US, ushering in the modern weekend. Eight-hour days and forty-hour weeks. Britain, Canada, Europe and other industrialised nations adopted it in the coming years.

1948: The Indian Factories Act stipulated that an employer cannot require a person to work more than 48 hours a week or more than 9 hours a day.